Our next contributor to the Cabinet of Curiosities this year is Ebony Muller.
Ebony Muller is a Melbourne-based dance practitioner and doctoral candidate in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Ebony incorporates her passion for inclusive and caring dance practice, performance and education as themes in her work through various modalities. You can find her teaching dance to people with disabilities at BAM Arts Inc. For more information on Ebony’s work or to get in contact visit ebonymuller.com.
CARE DANCE is an ongoing dance/movement improvisation practice and performance work. This workexists in direct retaliation to wide-spread ideas in dance and art-making in general surrounding violence as power and currency, and as indicative of artistic rigour in art-making environments. To do so, it utilises the ethics of care, a feminist moral theory, in order to further embody caring ideas such as listening, attentiveness, responsiveness and reflexivity in the present moment. With COVID-19 and its related necessary isolation, CARE DANCE (solo) is the isolated remains andis Ebony’s attempt at moving forward, albeit alone.
In CARE DANCE (solo) like its former, Ebony changes her clothes between three colours: red, yellow and green. These ‘traffic light’ colours denote different stages of attention and relationality to non-human others. From red as a focus on where Ebony isat as an individual, the shift from yellow and then green, denotes heropenness to all kinds of relationality, particularly physical sense. CARE DANCE (solo) is a work-in-progress; it is a moment in time of Ebony’s attempt to grapple with change, uncertainty and care in a new environment and shifting forms of relationality.